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Meeting Draws Racists, Pseudo-intellectuals

1998

Fall Issue

December 15, 1998

A group of pseudo-intellectuals obsessed with the 'race problem' rubbed shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists committed to 'the defense of Western Civilization.'

Coming together at a Virginia gathering committed to "the defense of Western Civilization," a group of pseudo-intellectuals obsessed with the "race problem" rubbed shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists in August.

More than 200 people attended the conference, dedicated to the theme "Why is Race the Problem That Will Not Go Away?" and hosted by white separatist author Jared Taylor's American Renaissance magazine.

Many of those there described the meeting, the third organized by the Taylor, as part of the formation of a "safe haven" for racial theorists who have been ostracized by mainstream American society. But even as academics took the limelight, former Klansmen like David Duke and Internet hatemonger Don Black were much in evidence.

Theories advanced were unconventional indeed.

Glayde Whitney, a psychology professor at Florida State University, told his audience that blacks are "bigger in bone, smaller in brain," biologically specialized "primitives" who often mate with white schoolgirls because they mature sexually faster and are physically larger and more aggressive than whites.

Today's fastest black marathon runners, he theorized, are "biologically adapted cattle thieves" because they come from a Kenyan tribe specializing in cattle theft where captured thieves were often put to death.

Other speakers included Samuel Francis, fired from his Washington Times job for racially inflammatory work; J. Philippe Rushton, a University of Western Ontario psychology professor who reportedly has promoted the idea of an inverse relationship between brain and penis size; Michael Walker, a European extreme rightist and editor of The Scorpion, a white nationalist newsletter; and Stephen Barry, editor of The Resister, billed as the "political warfare journal" of a secret right-wing military group.

Conference host Taylor long has attacked multiculturalism, saying that for whites such a policy is "nothing more than unilateral disarmament in a dangerous world." The author of a controversial book on race, Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America, Taylor also argues that blacks are less intelligent than whites and should be segregated.